To be honest, I never really expected to have anything to say about a teardown of the Drive companion apps, but here we are. Google uses Docs, Sheets, and Slides to give Android a mostly seamless editing experience for each of Drive's primary document types. They've gone through a steady set of improvements since launching in April and June of last year, either keeping pace or progressively catching up with the features offered by their web counterparts.

Update Wednesday went by with merely a whisper this week, barely registering more than a handful of fresh versions. Out of the group, we did get bumps for each of the Google Drive companion apps: Docs, Sheets, and Slides. All three received minor interface adjustments, the more notable changes went solely to Docs, which also gained rich editing support in Office Compatibility Mode and the ability to insert links into Google Documents.

Update Wednesday keeps rolling on, this time with new versions of Docs, Sheets, and Slides. This is a bigger update that actually warranted a blog post from Google. There are some nice functionality changes in all three apps.

Google has pushed out a number of tweaks to its suite of mobile office apps: Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Even Drive, the place where edited documents are stored, hasn't gone untouched. Some of these features are nice to see, so let's dive in.

What's New

Update: Docs, Sheets, and Slides all have full hamburger menu icons now.

In Docs, an option to select line spacing has appeared in the "Paragraph" section of the app.

Google's office suite in the cloud can handle a number of Microsoft's Office formats, a necessity born from the sheer entrenchment of the competition. The search giant isn't bitter though. Rather than shun the task of working with the various file types out there, it has added support for converting 15 more. The list includes less common formats spread across Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

Newly supported Microsoft Office formats:

Google Docs

dot, dotx, dotm, docm

Google Sheets

xlt, xltx, xltm, xlsm

Google Slides

pot, potx, potm, pptm, pps, ppsx, ppsm

After converting the documents, you're free to edit them as you would any other.

Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides have all received some love today, though the visual changes here are minor. For the most part, these apps were already all material-ed up, and while this update does dot some i's and cross some t's, it doesn't quite leave us satisfied. Fortunately that's not all there is to see here.

What's New

Let's get the biggest visual tweak out of the way first. Yes, Google has changed the hamburger menu icon in the action bar.

The downside to cloud services is that they're of absolutely no use when they're not available. Today Google Docs, Drive, Sheets, and Slides have all been unavailable for some of the people that have come to depend on them.

Google is aware of the issue, and it's showing a service disruption for each service on its apps status dashboard page. This is delineated in the screenshot below by the presence of an orange icon next to Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

Google is rolling out support for 18 new languages for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides today, bringing the total up to a whopping 65. Users can switch back and forth between languages as often as they want, and collaboration is supported across languages. The new additions are supported on mobile devices as well, so shoot your long distance friend an invite and give the new languages as go.

The new languages are:

Afrikaans

Amharic

Basque

Chinese (Hong Kong)

Estonian

French (Canada)

Galician

Icelandic

Khmer

Lao

Malaysian

Nepali

Persian

Sinhalese

Spanish (Latin America)

Swahili

Urdu

Zulu

To change the language on your computer, simply click the gear icon within Google Drive and select Settings.

While not everyone who owns an Android device roots, the Android modding community is at the very heart of everything we love about our little green buddy. Security researcher Dan Rosenberg recently gave a presentation where he elaborates on root and modding methods, as well as expounding on the security implications of modding Android phones.

Rosenberg also had quite a lot to say about how carriers influence the Android landscape.